ABOUT 70 percent of the budget of public schools are funded by taxes on real estate in many governments. On Guam, we have token real estate taxes, and have trouble collecting them.
For Academic Year 2003, Guam’s DOE spent approximately $143.4 million on 31,802 students or $4,500 per student from local appropriations (http://www.gdoe.net/rpe/statistics.htm), a little more than half of what the average school system in the U.S. spent.
Also in AY 2003 (the latest year for which budgetary figures are available for DOE), fully 88 percent (2,818 people) of all locally funded DOE employees (3,208 people) were physically located in the schools.
About 12 percent (385 people) of the employees were located “downtown.” Of them, 44 percent were secretaries, accountants, administrative assistants and computer people.
People working in payroll (6), personnel (9), planning (5) program coordination (8), program consulting (7) and auditing (3) accounted for 9.8 percent of “downtown” employees. So, as a first order estimate, 88 percent of the budget is spent in the school buildings.
Of the 2,818 (88 percent) of the employees physically located in the schools, 1,955 of them were teachers (69 percent), 14 percent (388 people) were aides, 5.5 percent (155 people) were maintenance workers, and 159 people (5.6 percent) worked in the cafeterias.
For the average GPSS school (there are 37 of them), there were 16 kids per teacher, 1,770 kids per librarian, 775 kids per nurse, 513 kids per administrator, 212 kids per cook, 328 kids per custodian, and 254 kids per secretary. There were 62 principals and assistant principals (2.2 percent) or 1.7 of them per school.
The entire DOE AY 2003 budget was 93 percent salaries, wages and benefits, and we spent 92 cents per day per kid on power and 8 cents per day per kid on water. Utilities ($8.6 million) were 6 percent of the entire budget, with nothing for supplies or equipment…or sports or music or arts or libraries, for that matter. No wonder the chiefs send their kids elsewhere.
Perhaps the numbers have changed somewhat in the past four years. Certainly, teachers deserve a raise to be paid what the “average” teacher gets. We definitely need more certified teachers and that will cost more money. GovGuam workers have not had a raise in many years. Money desperately needs to be spent to repair the chronic damage done to DOE’s physical plant.
If the chiefs and their representatives are serious about education, the budget of GPSS must increase substantially. I’d pay four times what I now pay ($438/year) in real estate taxes, and that would be cheap.

ERNIE MATSON
Talofofo, Guam